filter by Category

Eschatology

“I have been enjoying your program on my local Catholic radio station for many years and can happily give a large amount of the credit for my continuing spiritual growth to your offerings. You snatched up the banner many had laid aside and are marching bravely forward!”

Christian apologists have long used theological fantasy to engage the reader in speculating on points of the faith that can be difficult to discuss in didactic form. When I first published the narrative below, a reader told me it reminded him of The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis. Although I...

John Hagee is an Evangelical pastor at the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, and the author of several books. His latest book claims that four blood moons will appear over America as a sign from God that a world-shaking event will soon take place. These blood moons are part of a set of consecutive lunar eclipses beginning on April 15 (tomorrow!) and continuing in six month intervals until October 2015.

This phenomenon is also known as a tetrad, when the moon is covered by the...

The first funeral Mass I attended as a Catholic was for a young woman named Laura who died after a long illness. She was a kind person but was lapsed from her Catholic faith. She didn't hate the Church; she was simply indifferent. Most of those who knew her and prayed for her were confident that had she lived a while longer she would have come back to the Church.

Laura's funeral Mass was beautiful—that is, up until the homily. It was then that things took a turn for the weird. After...

Since the new musical film adaptation of Les Misérables hit theaters last Christmas, there has been no shortage of praise from Catholic reviewers (and some whiny criticism from the seculars) for director Tom Hooper’s decision not only to retain the religious themes baked into the libretto but to double down on them: lovingly filling frame after frame with crosses, candles, altars, vestments, chanting nuns, and every...

I hadn’t heard of Maria Divine Mercy. That’s the moniker of an Irish woman, living in Dublin, who doesn’t reveal her real name but does reveal that she’s been receiving messages from the Trinity and the Virgin Mary—nearly 700 messages since late 2010.

Maria Divine Mercy was brought to my attention by a Facebook friend who happens to be a woman religious and who, at the time of writing to me, was convinced that...

"Meg, I have borne a long time with thy husband; I have reasoned and argued with him in these points of religion, and still given to him my poor fatherly counsel, but I perceive none of all this able to call him home; and therefore, Meg, I will no longer dispute with him, but will clean give him over and get me to God and pray for him."

~ Sir Thomas More, Knight, Lord Chancellor of England, author and martyr; to his daughter Meg, regarding her husband, William Roper. To these prayers Roper attributed his return to the Faith; thereafter he was an ardent Catholic.